The bronze balance arm of Paxa’s apothecary scale creaked under the weight of five engraved brass plates and three quarto ledgers. The pointer shivered against the twenty-eight-pound notch. Paxa let the bundle settle back onto the cedar shelf with a solid, dry thump that sent a thin plume of old dust drifting through the yellow lantern beam.
“Forty-two bundles,” Paxa said again. Her voice was calm and level in the chill of the map room. “Twelve hundred pounds of metal, leather, and rag paper. You have three sound pack frames between the four of us, because Fellis can’t carry a load that pulls on his shoulder harness without dragging his braced wrist out of true. Our ration sacks hold nine days of dried mutton and coarse meal. If we pack sixty pounds of books per person, we leave behind our spare climbing rope, our winter cloaks, and six days of food.”
Kezra Venn stood in the aisle between the towering cedar presses, her right ear turned toward the healer. Meanwhile, her hand rested on the leather spine of a master water-table survey. Every instinct in her land-mapper’s training rebelled against the arithmetic. For two years, she had walked through mountain villages where roads ended in blind gullies, where irrigation canals had been cut through porous gravel because no one had recorded the underlying strata, and where whole ages lived in fear of mountain slides that an honest survey could have predicted decades before the rock slipped.
